Why You Can’t Sue Yourself Into a Sorority

(The Root) — Entitlement is a finicky fruit. It can ripen into the kind of “I got this” self-confidence that helps people nail interviews, land jobs and climb ladders. But entitlement can just as easily rot into the kind of nauseating conceit that puts people off. These days, too many millennials have been accused of stockpiling the latter without having enough of the former.

The most recent case of extreme entitlement in the court of public opinion involves two college students who allege in actual court that their human rights were violated when they weren’t admitted to their sorority of choice. Oh, OK.

Howard University seniors Laurin Compton and Lauren Cofield are suing their soon-to-be alma mater and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc. for discrimination based on their “familial status.” Their lawsuit hinges on two points: As “legacies” (the daughters of women in the sorority), both allege that they should have breezed into the sisterhood by birthright instead of being denied membership. Also, confusingly, the college coeds claim that they were denied membership because of their legacy status. Got that?

Both Compton and Cofield claim that they should be AKAs because their mothers are AKAs. In their reality, nepotism is apparently a right. But the young women also claim that they were illegally mistreated — unfairly bumped to the back of the applicant line when a cap was placed on the number of new members — because their mothers are AKAs.

So when a discriminatory practice didn’t work in their favor, both women cried discrimination.

I’m not sure what bothers me about this case more: the fact that anyone would think to sue because she wasn’t given enough preferential treatment or that the mother of a would-be AKA supports her daughter’s whining.

According to the Washington City Paper, Sandra Compton, Laurin Compton’s mother, claims in the suit that the would-be sisters were subjected by sorority members to “dehumanizing” hazing, which included picking up dry cleaning, addressing sisters by their full names and not wearing the sorority’s official colors. In light of the case of Robert Champion, the Florida AM University drum major who died after a hazing incident in November 2011, I am loath to identify what the Comptons and Cofield describe as anything resembling hazing.